This is just a simple environment with:

• zigbee2mqtt: a bridge from zigbee (through a zigbee USB stick) to MQTT
• mosquitto: an MQTT server
• home assistant: a home automation platform, with MQTT support. zigbee2mqtt also supports auto discovery for home assistant. (disabled for now)

You'll need to configure zigbee2mqtt with a z2m-data/configuration.yaml file. There is an onboarding web interface that is quite convenient, but I have disabled it . Just comment out the appropriate line (Z2M_ONBOARD_NO_SERVER=1) or create your own file like so:

homeassistant: true
permit_join: true
mqtt:
  base_topic: zigbee2mqtt
    server: 'mqtt://mqtt' # The mosquitto server in this case.
    serial:
      port: /dev/ttyACM0  # The serial device. It should be the same as the device entry in docker-compose.yml.

More info here: http://balkian.com/controlling-zigbee-devices-with-mqtt.html